Mental health and the community

Despite its global dimension, the COVID-19 pandemic had specific characteristics and behaviours in different locations worldwide. Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Lima, Santiago de Chile, are cities marked by high population density, social inequality and intense processes of exclusion and violence. In these contexts, where possibilities of contagion were higher, sanitary measures of social distancing and isolation were particularly complex, especially in their peripheries due to multiple material, emotional and biosocial dimensions. This call is an invitation to reflect on the processes of resistance, care, and self-care of local communities from the Global South, especially Latin America, in the face of the social suffering that the pandemic brought with it. Our ethnographic experience in the São Paulo metropolis showed how the lived experience of multiple “urban insecurities” in the peripheries are related to subjective processes of suffering and anguish, beyond the physical characteristics of the city or factors directly associated with the pandemic itself (Abarca Brown et al., 2022). In this sense, the relational dynamics of exclusion in the urban space, that characterize many cities of Latin America, were of paramount relevance to understanding processes that helped combat the coronavirus's psychological effects and the pandemic's mental health consequences more broadly. The invitation is directed to researchers interested in health-disease-care processes in the Global South that recognize the emergence of old and new individual and collective caring practices that are often invisible to policymakers, public health and academia in general.